


There Is Always Some Madness In Love…

by AnnaRaven



Category: BioShock, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Rapture (BioShock), Splicers - Freeform, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 21:40:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14294010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaRaven/pseuds/AnnaRaven
Summary: Rapture is drowning, suffocating under the weight of its own arrogance. Grandeur gives way to decay as the city of dreams collapses into ruin, destroyed by greed and ambition just as surely as by the dark water seeping in through the cracks.The place where I stand was once a ballroom, I think. The towering pillars and rotting streamers bring to mind a party and I close my eyes, seeking detail in my memories. I can hear music, joyous and alive. I can feel the crisp sharpness of champagne bubbles on my tongue, in my throat, in my nose. I can feel the warmth of someone I love at my side but I can’t see their face, only the impression of midnight hair and mahogany eyes. An aching sense of loss cracks my chest when the memory slips away.





	There Is Always Some Madness In Love…

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FallingOverSideways](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FallingOverSideways/gifts).



Rapture is drowning, suffocating under the weight of its own arrogance. Grandeur gives way to decay as the city of dreams collapses into ruin, destroyed by greed and ambition just as surely as by the dark water seeping in through the cracks.

The place where I stand was once a ballroom, I think. The towering pillars and rotting streamers bring to mind a party and I close my eyes, seeking detail in my memories. I can hear music, joyous and alive. I can feel the crisp sharpness of champagne bubbles on my tongue, in my throat, in my nose. I can feel the warmth of someone I love at my side but I can’t see their face, only the impression of midnight hair and mahogany eyes. An aching sense of loss rends my chest when the memory slips away.

I open my eyes. Blue light ripples across the cracked floor beneath my feet, cold and restless as the ocean outside the window. A thin breeze creeps around my face, stale and bitter and rancid. Somewhere in the distance a gramophone is playing a song about love and loss, an echoing melody rising and falling, the music crackly and unclear. I feel lost and afraid, unsettled, but I know that I’m at home and that scares me most of all.

“Care to dance?” says a rough-smooth voice behind me, and I turn. A man is standing in a patch of dappled light, outlined in a turquoise glow which sets neon highlights in his thick black hair. He wears a torn, beautifully cut tuxedo adorned with patches of mould and the leather of his shiny shoes is cracked. A bone-grey mask obscures part of his face but his smile is bright, his jaw firm, his teeth white in the twilight of our world. His eyes catch the sea-filtered light and glow blue then brown, coffee and ice. He is handsome, this man, familiar and unfamiliar. There’s something about him that calls to me, and something else that screams at me to run.

The sense of familiarity grows and deepens as another memory swims to the surface of my mind. I can see this man stretched out on a bed, muscles straining under olive skin, naked and gasping as I plough into him. His mahogany eyes are gleaming with love and warmth; a name I don’t remember is falling from his lips - _Shepard_ , he breathes silently. Arousal creeps up on me, flowing thick and syrupy through my veins.

Then the memory passes and I’m back in the crumbling ballroom, looking into eyes that are lit now with a different kind of glow, sickly and wild. The hand he holds out to me is gnarled and twisted into something inhuman, a sign of a hopeless ADAM addict ( _filthy splicer_ ). On some sickening impulse I look down at my own body; I’m horrified by the sight of my twisted foot, nausea clawing at my belly. But in the next second the feeling is gone and a numb sort of peace comes over me, and suddenly I know who this man is, and I smile.

My lover’s mouth curls into a rictus grin, compelling in its menace. It hits me that he is insane, that I know this already and that I don’t care. Then I take his offered hand, unmoved by its ugliness, and realise that I also am insane.

It’s such a freeing thought that it makes me laugh, and he laughs too, and then he twirls me through the ghostly blue light of the ocean as the melancholy music fades to silence.


End file.
